Can someone explain the use of the Japanese alphabets?

Question

Can you please just explain it to me simply because all websites don't give it clearly. Why do the Japanese have different writing styles and when is each one used... for what?

Whats Hiragana, Kanji, Katakana, Hentaigana, Romanji?

VERY ANNOYING!!

And also add Kana?

Answer 1

Hiragana: The basic Japanese writing system. It's now used for young children, furigana (hiragana above kanji with special pronounciations), and for parts of a sentence that are wholly Japanese and were not taken from China. Hiragana used to be just for women as it's "soft" and "easier", but now everyone learns it as a child. There are also plenty of Japanese words always written in this way, even if it does technically have its own kanji (e.g.: konnichiwa and sushi).

Katakana: The writing system for foreign words or when you need to add a huge emphasis on a word, similar to how English uses italics.

Kana: The easy way of saying hiragana and katakana when you mean both and not one or the other.

Kanji: It's used not only to make reading a hundred times faster, but as a stamp of Japan's history with China. Most of the kanji used in Japan has Chinese origins and sometimes share similar pronounciations / meanings, but also have specific, more-often-used, Japanese pronounciations and meanings.

Hentaigana: Illegible kana/kanji written in a "cursive" like fashion. (Much like cursive handwriting in English.) People like this as their tattoos in Western countries.

Romaji: The devil language that fangirls (who are too lazy to learn kana) use in their crappy stories where X anime character falls in love with Y original characer (see: Mary Sue).
It's also known as the "romanization of Japanese".

Answer 2

Japanese doesn't have an alphabet, instead it has three writing systems. Two of them are syllabaries and those are hiragana and katakana. Hiragana is for grammatical parts of Japanese like particles, it's also used for words that are rarely ever written in kanji. Katakana is for foreign words, like hamburger or the name Justin. Kanji is the third, and it's used for everything that hiragana and katakana aren't. And, yes, you have to learn all three if you want to read and write fluently in Japanese.

Answer 3

Kana is a word to represent both Hiragana and Katakana.

Romanji is the name of the Latin alphabet, used for some foreign loan words although seldom used.

Katakana is a syllabic writing system, mostly used to write words of foreign origin.

Hiragana is a syllabic system mostly used to represent the grammar of the Japanese language.

Kanji are the Chinese symbols, although there are fewer in use than in the Chinese language.

To know more, please look at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_writing

Answer 4

Hiragana- basic phonetic alphabet

Katakana- phonetic alphabet used when writing foreign words

Kanji- Chinese characters with specific meanings rather than sounds, each may have multiple pronounciations

Romanji- Roman character, like we use in English